Crossfire

by Jim Marrs

  Nixon’s recollection improved during a 1967 interview with journalist Jules Witcover. Speaking about the assassination, Nixon said:

  I was in a taxicab when I got the news. I had been in Dallas attending a meeting. I flew back to New York the next morning. It must have happened just as my plane was landing. My cab stopped for a light in Queens and a guy ran over and said, “Have you got a radio? The President’s been wounded.” I thought, “Oh, my God, it must have been one of the nuts.” A half hour later I got to my apartment and the doorman told me he was dead. I called J. Edgar Hoover and asked him, “What happened? Was it one of the nuts?” Hoover said, “No, it was a communist.”

  The supposed attack on Nixon by Oswald undoubtedly is one of the more ludicrous incidents of the Warren Commission investigation—and it is a prime example of the unreliability of Marina Oswald’s testimony.

  In early February 1964, when Marina Oswald first testified to the Commission, she failed to mention the incident when asked if her husband had expressed any hostility toward any official of the United States. In June, her memory jogged by an FBI report from Oswald’s brother Robert, she said that just a few days before Oswald left for New Orleans on April 24, 1963, he had put on a good suit after reading a morning newspaper. She told the Commission:

  I saw that he took a pistol. I asked him where he was going and why he was getting dressed. He answered, “Nixon is coming. I want to go and have a look.” . . . I called him into the bathroom and I closed the door and I wanted to prevent him and then I started to cry. And I told him that he shouldn’t do this, and that he had promised me.

  She told the Commission she locked him in the bathroom to prevent him from trying to shoot Nixon. However, as confirmed by an FBI investigation, the bathroom—like all others—locked from the inside. Accordingly, in a subsequent interview with the Commission, Marina amended her story by saying she held the bathroom door for hours to prevent Oswald from leaving.

  The Commission, upon learning that Nixon was not even in Dallas at any time near this incident, decided that Marina may have been mistaken and that the target of Oswald’s pistol may have been Vice President Johnson, who had visited Dallas on April 23.

  In an Oval Office meeting on June 23, 1972—just five days after the Nixon-connected burglars were caught in the Watergate office complex—Nixon spoke with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, saying, “Of course, this Hunt [Watergate burglar and CIA liaison with the anti-Castro Cubans E. Howard Hunt], that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things, and we feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. . . . The President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.”

  After telling Nixon that the FBI was aware of CIA operatives’ involvement in the Watergate affair, Haldeman told his chief, “The problem is it tracks back to the Bay of Pigs and it tracks back to some other, the leads run out to people who had no involvement in this, except by contracts and connection, but it gets into areas that are liable to be realized.”

  What could Nixon and Haldeman have been talking about? The “whole Bay of Pigs thing” had been over for more than ten years. Nixon was out of office when the actual invasion began and the assault’s disastrous consequences were a matter of historical record. Could they have been circuitously referring to the interlocking connections between CIA agents, anti-Castro Cubans, and mobsters that likely resulted in the Kennedy assassination? Did they themselves have some sort of insider knowledge of this event?

  Haldeman appeared to answer these questions a year later in his 1994 book, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House. He wrote, “It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.”

  It also is significant to recall that when Hunt later demanded $2 million to keep quiet about what he knew, Nixon agreed and the money was raised. Some of this money was being ferried by Hunt’s first wife, Dorothy, when she died in the crash of United Airlines Flight 553 in December 1972.

  It may also be significant to consider the number of people connected with the Warren Commission who were hired or considered for employment by Nixon’s circle during Watergate.

  Nixon White House counsel John Dean’s lawyer was Commission administrative aide Charles N. Shaffer; Nixon counsel John Ehrlichman hired Commission senior counsel Joseph Ball as his lawyer; Nixon initially wanted Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin as Watergate prosecutor, then wanted Commission member John McCloy but later accepted Commission special counsel Leon Jaworski (who represented Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr); Nixon named Rankin to “edit” White House tapes; Nixon accepted Commission senior counsel Albert E. Jenner as chief minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee considering Nixon’s impeachment; and Nixon asked Commission counsel Arlen Specter to help with his defense.

  Specter, the former senator from Pennsylvania, was the chief architect of the controversial “single-bullet theory” for the Warren Commission. He was a protégé of Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, and had served as co-chairman of the Pennsylvania division of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) in 1972.

  Commission attorney David Belin—long its most ardent supporter—headed Lawyers for Nixon.

  In the final days of Watergate, organized-crime investigator Dan E. Moldea revealed that military authorities, including Nixon’s chief of staff, General Alexander Haig, began to connect their chief with several mobsters, including Florida’s Santos Trafficante, believed responsible for setting up heroin routes from Vietnam and making payoffs to Nixon associates.

  Moldea quoted a Justice Department official as saying:

  The whole goddamn thing is too frightening to think about. We’re talking about the President of the United States . . . a man who pardoned organized crime figures after millions were spent by the government putting them away, a guy who’s had these connections since he was a congressman in the 1940s. I guess the real shame is that we’ll never know the whole story, it’ll never come out.

  In a final nose-thumbing to the American people, Nixon appointed former Warren Commission member Gerald R. Ford as vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 under tax evasion charges.

  One of Ford’s first public actions was to pardon Nixon of any crimes—past, present, or future.

  If there was a plot to assassinate Kennedy, wouldn’t someone have become aware of it?

  There are many indications that in the fall of 1963, certain persons did.

  We already have learned of persons seemingly aware of Kennedy’s impending death, such as racist J. A. Milteer. It appears that some corporate leaders also may have been aware of Kennedy’s fate.

  A Killing on Wall Street

  In the thirty minutes following Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, the Dow Jones average fell more than 21.16 points. An estimated 6 million shares of stock changed hands, wiping out about $15 billion in paper values on the New York Stock Exchange alone. It was the greatest stock market panic since 1929. The panic and confusion was such that the Securities and Exchange Commission closed the stock exchange shortly after 2 p.m., more than eighty minutes before normal closing time. It was the first emergency shutdown of the stock market since August 1933.

  A few sharp investors—or perhaps individuals with knowledge of what was to come—had taken “short” positions in scattered areas of the market. That is, some stocks unaccountably were sold before the market dropped, indicating some people may have had advance word that something momentous was about to happen and that stock values would drop.

  When the stock market reopened on November 26, 1963—just four days after the assassination—the New York Stock Exchange made a record $21 billion advance, more than regaining the losses incurred the day Kennedy died. It was the biggest single-day rise in the history of the stock market. More huge profits were made. No one has publicly identified the men who made their own private killing
in the stock market, but it has been estimated that the profits made on November 22 alone totaled more than $500 million.

  At least one author has suggested that the immense amount of money that changed hands on November 22, 1963, was the motivation behind Kennedy’s death. And while most researchers reject this idea, many do believe that certain individuals—using insider information on the impending assassination—could not resist the temptation to profit from the tragedy.

  Another overlooked aspect of Kennedy’s attempt to reform American society involves money.

  At the time of the War Between the States, president Abraham Lincoln found the big banks demanded high interest rates, from 24 to 36 percent, to fund the war. Rather than saddle the nation with unredeemable debt, he ordered the US Treasury to issue new legal tender—United States notes. Previously, demand notes had been issued. They were simply promissory paper redeemable for gold or silver. United States notes, the longest serving paper money in US history, were fiat notes, money issued through the treasury backed only by faith in the federal government. Under Lincoln’s orders, these new notes, popularly known as greenbacks, replaced demand notes. The greenback currency worked so well that political struggles and court cases continued into the late 1870s, when silver certificates again began to be issued.

  Kennedy understood, as did Lincoln, that by returning to the Constitution, which states that only Congress shall coin and regulate money, the soaring national debt could be reduced by not paying interest to the bankers of the Federal Reserve System, who print paper money, then loan it to the government at interest. He moved in this area on June 4, 1963, by signing Executive Order (EO) 11110 authorizing the Treasury Department to start printing and issuing silver certificates based on the remaining silver in the US Treasury and the Commodity Credit Corporation. Gold-backed currency in the United States had ended in 1933.

  Kennedy’s executive order stated:

  The authority vested in the President by paragraph (b) of section 43 of the Act of May 12, 1933, as amended (31 USC. 821(b)), to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury not then held for redemption of an outstanding silver certificates, to prescribe the denominations of such silver certificates, and to coin standard silver dollars and subsidiary silver currency for their redemption, and (b) By revoking subparagraphs (b) and (c) of paragraph 2 thereof.

  There has been considerable confusion and misunderstanding over EO 11110. From the available evidence—and there appears to be missing and even altered data—with this order JFK was making a surreptitious effort to return money-creation power from the privately owned Federal Reserve to the Treasury Department.

  On the surface, EO 11110 appeared to be a simple change to president Harry Truman’s Executive Order 10289 of 1951, which gave such power to the treasury through the issuance of treasury silver certificates. This silver, more than $100 million worth accumulated largely through reparations from World War I, was to be put in storage under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and amended by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. These acts also fully created the Commodity Credit Corporation and the Exchange Stabilization Fund, both of which held huge sums of money, some of which was being used for purposes such as funding covert intelligence activities.

  In other words, EO 11110 allowed the treasury full access to silver certificates from the bowels of Fort Knox and would have drastically lowered the US government loan rate—and by inference interest payments—to the Federal Reserve. JFK was seeking to ease the inflation rate and this one order (EO 11110) would have accomplished just that. This would have placed more silver into the general population and paid off debt to the Federal Reserve.

  JFK’s EO 11110 expanded the Treasury Department’s power to issue non-interest-bearing money from governmental reserves and edged out the US need to approach the Federal Reserve to print more interest-bearing Federal Reserve notes.

  EO 11110 therefore allowed for the issuance of $4,292,893,815 in silver-backed treasury bills, called United States notes. That same day, Kennedy also signed a bill changing the backing of $1 and $2 bills from silver to gold, adding strength to the weakening US currency. Kennedy’s successor, President Johnson, did nothing to change this situation. It was President Ronald Reagan who in September 1987 issued EO 12608 as part of a general clean-up of executive orders. EO 12608 revoked the section added by EO 11110. This effectively revoked the entire order. Today we continue to use interest-bearing Federal Reserve notes, and the deficit is more than $16 trillion, an all-time high.

  The upshot of all this seemed to be Kennedy’s attempt to increase the monetary and credit supply by infusing the economy with United States notes issued through the treasury rather than the private interest-charging Federal Reserve System.

  And the fact remains that such interest-free United States notes were indeed issued and Kennedy showed signs of attempting to undercut the power of the heretofore unassailable Federal Reserve System.

  Kennedy’s comptroller of the currency, James J. Saxon, had been at odds with the powerful Federal Reserve Board for some time, encouraging broader investment and lending powers for banks that were not part of the Federal Reserve System. Saxon also had decided that non-Reserve banks could underwrite state and local general obligation bonds, again weakening the dominant Federal Reserve banks.

  Considering that the battle over US monetary control by a monolithic central bank dates back to the founding of the Republic, some assassination researchers believe Kennedy’s little-noted efforts to reform the money supply and curtail the Federal Reserve System may have cost him much more than just the enmity of the all-powerful international bankers. Many assassination researchers feel it was not a mere coincidence that Lincoln and Kennedy, the only two US presidents who attempted to issue interest-free money, were both shot in the head in public.

  President Kennedy inched farther out on a limb with big business on January 17, 1963, when he presented both his administration’s budget and proposals for tax reform that included a tax cut.

  Kennedy’s tax proposals included relieving the tax burden of low-income and elderly persons, revising tax treatment of capital gains for a better flow of capital funds, and broadening the base of individual and corporate income taxes to remove special privileges and loopholes and even to do away with the oil depletion allowance.

  This last possibility brought the beleaguered president into direct confrontation with one of the most powerful and single-minded groups in America—wealthy oilmen.

  Kennedy and Oilmen

  The history of oil is replete with stories of unbounded greed, business chicanery, and even violence.

  In 1923, the first major oil scandal occurred when it was discovered that president Warren G. Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall, had accepted money from oilmen in exchange for secretly leasing drilling rights on government land in Wyoming known as the Teapot Dome.

  By 1933, there were calls to make the vital oil industry a public utility with governmental controls. One of the men supporting this move was president Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes. However, FDR was finally turned against the plan by Texas congressman Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson’s mentor, who faithfully represented Texas oil interests in Washington.

  After World War II, the Marshall Plan began turning recovering European nations away from coal to oil. Refining capacity in Europe tripled in just a few years.

  In 1950, a secret agreement was reached between the State Department and major oil companies that allowed all royalties paid to Arab nations to be applied as tax credits.

  Dwight Eisenhower was elected with strong support from the oil industry and, early in 1953, in one of his first actions, he stopped a grand jury investigation into the “international Petroleum Cartel,” citing reasons of “national security.”

  The same year, a CIA-backed coup reinstated the Shah of Iran and new oil arrangements were made with Iran. Ironically, the I
ranian coup was masterminded by Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy’s grandson, who went on to become a vice president of Gulf Oil. The Suez Crisis in 1956 signaled the end of British and French colonialism in the Middle East, and the major oil companies moved to consolidate their power.

  When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, the oil industry felt secure.

  But then President Kennedy began to assault the power of the oil giants directly, first with a law known as the Kennedy Act, and later by attacking the oil depletion allowance. The Kennedy Act, passed on October 16, 1962, removed the distinction between repatriated profits and profits reinvested abroad. Both were now subject to US taxation. The measure also was aimed at preventing taxable income from being hidden away in foreign subsidiaries and other tax havens. While this law applied to industry as a whole, it particularly affected the oil companies, which were greatly diversified with large overseas operations.

  By the end of 1962, oilmen estimated their earnings on foreign investment capital would fall to 15 percent, compared with 30 percent in 1955.

  One of the most sacred of provisions in the eyes of oilmen was the oil depletion allowance, which permitted oil producers to treat up to 27.5 percent of their income as tax exempt. In theory this was to compensate for the depletion of fixed oil reserves but, in effect, it gave the oil industry a lower tax rate. Under this allowance, an oilman with a good deal of venture capital could become rich with virtually no risk. For example, a speculator could drill ten wells. If nine were dry holes and only the tenth struck oil, he would still make money because of tax breaks and the depletion allowance.

  It was estimated at the time that oilmen might lose nearly $300 million a year if the depletion allowance was diminished. Attempts to eliminate or reduce the depletion allowance were rebuffed year after year by congressmen, many of whom were the happy recipients of oil-industry contributions.